Albert had understood and digested the work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and retained in his personality a zest of cynicism and a critical view of himself and the other. However, he lived a life that was imprinted by generosity and the philosophy of Nietzsche. To affirm life, you must strive for greatness, and accomplish self-defining tasks.
Albert was born in Casablanca in 1956 into a family of Sephardic Jews that had traveled Europe and then its colonial expansions that they called home. They ended up in Paris when Albert was 13 and already an excellent student interested in math and science. Being good academically in French schools at the time meant a choice between ‘Grandes écoles’, veterinary school or medical school. Albert decided that medicine was academically interesting but was unsure about practicing it full time. Nonetheless, he graduated in medicine from the Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris and became a dermatologist. Albert then decided to explore science and immunology by joining the laboratory of Jean-François Bach at the Necker Hospital in Paris. There, he found his calling and published a series of landmark papers in the field of type 1 diabetes, including on the transfer of disease by T cells, CD4 and CD8 dependency of disease progression, and abrogation of disease by MHC class II antibodies. To become a ‘real’ scientist, Albert followed the remarkable curriculum of immunology at the Pasteur Institute, obtained his PhD in 1992, and pursued his training by joining the laboratory of Ron Schwartz at the National Institutes of Health for a postdoctoral fellowship.
